Harlan Ellison Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyes water.

  Harlan Ellison

  Running, Jobs, Responsibility

  "Shatterday: Stories". Book by Harlan Ellison, April 1, 2014.

• People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

  Harlan Ellison

  Morning, Writing, Thinking

• The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Becoming, Tricks

  "Voices of Vision: Creators of Science Fiction and Fantasy Speak". Book by Jayme Lynn Blaschke (p. 182), April 1, 2005.

• Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

  Harlan Ellison

  Book, Writing, World

  "Quit Your Day Job!: How to Sleep Late, Do What You Enjoy, and Make a Ton of Money as a Writer". Book by Jim Denney and James D. Denney, 2003.

• Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Intelligent, Praise
• 

  I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well.

  Harlan Ellison

  Jobs, Writing, Years

• You're a writer. And that's something better than being a millionaire. Because it's something holy.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Holy, Millionaire

• The trap into which all writers have, will, or should fall into, of writing The Great American Watchamacallit, is such an uncluttered and inviting one that from time to time I'm sure even the greatest have to pull themselves up short by the Shift key to remind themselves that it is story first that they should write.

  Harlan Ellison

  Fall, Writing, Keys

• Anyone who can not write should.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Editing, Editors

• Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.

  Harlan Ellison

  Jobs, Writing, Please

• Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.

  Harlan Ellison

  Wise, Children, Writing

  Harlan Ellison (2014). “Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories”, p.103, Open Road Media

• It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Mean, Discovery

• Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Coward, Commodity

  Harlan Ellison (1972). “Dangerous Visions”, Berkley

• There is no nobler chore in the craft of writing than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal,' the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Reality, Glasses

• What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Soul, Trying

  "Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers". Book by Ann Evory, 1982.

• Writing is a holy chore.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Holy, Chores

  Harlan Ellison (1972). “Dangerous Visions”, Berkley

• Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Way, Doe

  Harlan Ellison (2016). “Slippage”, p.128, Hachette UK

• Everybody has a talent, whether it's scrapbooking, or kite-flying, or brain surgery, or writing, everybody has a talent. And if they discover it, and they turn it to their purposes and make a living out of it, then they become not "that person," but they become "that writer" or "that doctor" or "that supervisor."

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Doctors, Flying

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. June 8, 2008.

• The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Mean, Wish

  "Harlan Ellison, Part Two". Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. June 08, 2008.

• The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.

  Harlan Ellison

  Meaningful, Writing, Reality

• I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Audience, Knows

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. June 8, 2008.

• I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Past, Rhythm

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